Multi-Solution Management – Starting with AEM

Posts tagged "LiveCycle"

AEM Rockstar at 2017 Adobe Summit

This year over 12,000 people, including attendees from 1,600 Partners, will be at Adobe Summit, making it the largest Summit ever. Over 200 sessions and labs are held during Summit, including the AEM Rockstar session. This year’s AEM Rockstar session features five winners who submitted their favorite Tips & Tricks for working with Adobe Experience Manager. In upcoming weeks, come back here to see more posts detailing the best tips & tricks from the five AEM Rockstar winners and some of the runners-up.

Todays’s guest post is written by AEM Rockstar runner-up Gary Howell, who is a Sr. Development Manager at iCiDIGITAL, a digital agency in Raleigh, NC that specializes in AEM. Gary has expertise in Adobe CQ5, Java, OSGi and Sling and has extensive frontend development and server-side coding experience.

Five Tips and Tricks to use AEM Forms More Effectively

Forms are a part of nearly every site on the web. From Fortune 100 companies to the pizza place down the street.

There are many different form solutions you can use on your site, but for many of them you must install a plug-in or go through a complex set-up. However, if you are using an AEM platform, you have the benefits of AEM Forms, allowing users to easily create, manage, and track forms on their site.

There is a lot of good documentation on AEM Forms on the Adobe site, but I figured I’d save you some time by showing you five tips and tricks that my team and I have found to use AEM Forms more effectively.

1)Form Fragments: Form fragments are most commonly used when you have sections or part of a form you want to reuse on multiple forms. They allow you to easily create part of a form – such as a signature – as a form fragment. You can then reference that specific form fragment on other forms across your site. The power of form fragments is that if you modify a piece of your signature form fragment, for example, the year, you have to change it only once and it will change on all your forms.

2)Rule Editor: Normally you need to write custom code to execute specific rules on a form such as showing, hiding, validating a field, or disabling a piece of the form. But AEM Forms comes with a rule editor that allows you to easily add this functionality. For example, you can add a rule so that when a user selects a checkbox to have their billing address the same as their home address, it will prefill the billing address with the values they previously entered. Cutting down on the time a user spends on your form means getting one step closer to making a conversion.

3)E-Sign: One of the major pain points with forms on the web – and one that halts conversions – is when the user has to print out a form, sign it and then resend it to you. With AEM forms, you no longer have to do that. AEM Forms comes out of the box with the E-Sign function to enable authors to create forms that can be safely and securely signed by designated users online, with no printing needed.

4)Form Submission: If you’re managing multiple sites or have a fairly complex site, this feature can be one of the most important. AEM Forms allows developers to easily submit forms in a variety of different ways. For example, you can develop a servlet that submits to a REST endpoint that sends data to your SalesForce instance. Or when a user fills out a form, you can kick off a workflow that notifies a user group that there are new submissions in their inbox, so they can quickly get in touch with their users.

5) Output Service: Outputting forms in various formats such as PDF, PNG, or in a custom format has always been a challenge. Luckily with AEM Forms output service you have an API you can tap into to easily output your forms in a variety of formats. Not only does the output service allow you to generate printable PDFs, but it supports output design features of Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES4 – a key feature for anyone coming from a LiveCycle instance to AEM Forms.

With the release of AEM Forms, you no longer need to create a completely custom solution on your own, thereby reducing the difficulty of upgrading and maintaining your library of forms. AEM Forms frequently comes out with new releases, and each one has new enhancements and features. Keep a look out for what AEM Forms has to offer in the future!